Tag Archives: afghanistan

Spectacles

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It has been a few days since one of my students at the Institute is having a hard time reading and writing and his school results have gone down. We asked a few questions and we discovered that he broke his spectacles and his family does not have money to buy new ones (about 30$ between frames and lenses).

Another one is always tired; his eyes are red, and he struggles to focus. I called him to my office and asked him what was going on. He said that there is no problem, and everything is normal. For him normal means living in a tiny room behind the woodworking workshop of his cousin. After school he works there to earn a bit of money and then in the evening he goes for tuition. His family is in Kuduz, probably the most dangerous part of the country right now. I asked him to come and stay at the students’ dorm, but he declined the offer: I think he fears that if he moves out of his cousin workshop he’ll lose the opportunity to earn a little.

There is a boy who is emotionally unstable, his parents tell him he’s good for nothing and he only finds peace of mind when he draws. He told us: “People say I am crazy.” At the Institute, he’s just a boy like anyone else: he’s found his little world and a bit of tranquillity.

Another student is distracted and absent-minded, we catch him often staring at the void. His brother – to whom he resembles immensely – has been killed in a bomb-blast last year, it has recently been the first anniversary. How can we help him restore an emotional balance?

I have been back in Kabul only for three days and these are the stories that welcomed me. Yet again, a unique opportunity to put my priorities in order and remember not to take anything for granted.

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Li chiamano rimpatri

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A Kabul la neve paralizza l’aeroporto; alcuni dicono sia colpa del ghiaccio, altri pensano che ci sia un problema con i radar che non distinguono i fiocchi di neve dagli altri oggetti volanti. Per tornare, ho fatto scalo ad Istanbul dove l’aereo è arrivato in ritardo dall’Italia là per là non me ne sono preoccupata convinta che il volo per Kabul non sarebbe partito per via della neve e invece atterro e vedo sul display la scritta rossa lampeggiante “Ultima Chiamata.”

Salgo sull’aereo di corsa convinta di essere l’ultima. L’aereo è pieno, per lo più giovani uomini afghani, fra venti e trent’anni, con l’aria sperduta. C’è odore di sudore e panni non lavati. Siamo fermi sulla pista da una buona mezzora quando il capitano ci dice – solo in turco e in inglese – che per il maltempo e per questioni indipendenti dalla sua volontà il volo è posticipato ed ha un ritardo indefinito. Poi ci invita a sbarcare non prima, però, dell’arrivo della polizia. Con voce priva di emozione aggiunge che prima di poter scendere, dobbiamo aspettare che le forze dell’ordine completino le formalità di sbarco per i “deportati.” I giovani uomini afghani sono dunque quelli arrivati come clandestini e che adesso la maggior parte dei paesi europei sta rispendendo in Afghanistan.

Deportati.

L’onestà della definizione mi ha colpito come un pugno allo stomaco – forse non necessariamente con fini politici, ma questa semplice frase del comandate mi ha dato la misura dell’orrore di cui sono stata testimone impotente.

Nei corridoi stretti dell’aereo, passano in fila indiana, vicini vicini, uno dietro l’altro, con gli occhi grandi di paura. Fuori c’è una notte gelida e la maggior parte di loro ha giacche leggere e maglioncini sottili; nevica a vento, alcuni portano i sandali. Hanno tutti una grande busta di plastica trasparente: mutande, calzini, un asciugamano rosa; tutto in vista, nessuna considerazione per un senso di decoro privato. Guardo e sto zitta, incapace di radunare abbastanza coraggio per denunciare la follia di quanto mi sta succedendo sotto gli occhi.

Poco prima di Natale, un’amica di amici mi aveva chiesto di dare una mano ad un ragazzo rispedito a Kabul dopo vent’anni passati in giro per il mondo come rifugiato. Ho fatto appena in tempo a sentirlo per telefono: era terrorizzato, in Afghanistan non conosceva nessuno e stava per attraversare il confine per passare ancora volta in Iran dove c’era già parte della sua famiglia prima di rimettersi in viaggio. Un mese fa ho letto di un ragazzo appena rimpatriato – si, le deportazioni forzate vengono chiamate rimpatri per non offendere coloro che hanno lo stomaco sensibile – che è rimasto vittima di uno dei sanguinosi attacchi a Kabul: era arrivato in Afghanistan il giorno prima.

Questi ragazzi sono quelli di cui parlano con la schiuma alla bocca gli xenofobi di mezzo mondo, sono quelli che minacciano la nostra sicurezza e i nostri diritti acquisiti, sono quelli che minano la nostra civiltà.

Bisognerebbe avere la possibilità di guardare queste persone in faccia anche solo per un secondo per capire che l’unica cosa che è a rischio in questo momento è la nostra umanità. Sono la prima a dichiararmi colpevole di indifferenza giustificata dall’ignoranza. Avevo letto delle deportazioni, alcuni miei colleghi mi avevano detto che anche il loro volo per Kabul era pieno di giovani uomini scortati dalla polizia. Sapevo e ho ignorato, mi è servito vedere con i miei occhi per rendermi conto dell’enormità di cui siamo complici e adesso scrivo per placare i sensi di colpa e con la speranza che le parole possano aiutare altri a vedere quello che è più comodo ignorare.

La paura ci sta rendendo ciechi. Guardiamo dall’altra parte per evitare di prendere posizione, io non ho avuto la forza di alzarmi e gridare la mia indignazione. Mi sono sentita morire dentro e non sono stata capace di dirlo ad alta voce. L’ignavia facilita il fascismo, mai come adesso il silenzio ci rende complici. Ma da soli non ci si riesce – o almeno io non ci riesco – a superare le barriere insormontabili del qualunquismo. Le scelte di solidarietà e di umanità sono necessariamente collettive, condivise, parlate ad alta voce, sofferte e sentite con cuore molteplice. Forse è per questo che scrivo oggi. Per non sentirmi sola. Per sapere che non sono sola.

The things that I don’t know

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white-noise

Yesterday the cousin of one of our teachers has been killed in a targeted assassination. It felt like one of those stories that you read on the newspaper and you think they will never be part of your life because they belong to a foreign elsewhere. One of those stories that are beyond the ordinary and have nothing to do with the normality of the everyday.

I am here to run a school. Before I started, my idea of what my routine would look like included the revision of teaching methods, the achievement of artistic excellence, grades and disciplinary notes. What turned out to be a part of my ordinary administration is also the management of situations that are extraordinary, alien and emotionally destabilising – which, however, in a country at war are sadly integral to daily life.

Impermanence and transience are difficult to conceive as some of the inevitable ingredients of our life; they are difficult to digest as a force that roots you in the present rather than as a windstorm that erases any sense of direction.

The concept of resilience is often abused and quoted far too frequently and light-hardheartedly. But it is moments like this, when all the things that I don’t know lay bare, that reveal the mysterious strength that we have inside and we’re often not aware of. It is an immense force that helps keeping things together; that helps continuing to look ahead; a silent strength that protects the desire – as Vittorio Arrigoni used to say – to stay human.

Le cose che non so

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white-noise

Ieri il cugino di uno dei nostri insegnanti è stato ucciso in un assassinio mirato. Una di quelle storie che si leggono sui giornali, lontane milioni di anni luce, che pensi non faranno mai parte della tua vita perché appartengono ad un altrove sconosciuto. Una di quelle storie fuori dall’ordinario che non hanno niente a che fare con la normalità del quotidiano.

Sono qui che gestisco una scuola. La mia immaginazione di quella che sarebbe stata la mia routine prima che cominciassi a lavorare includeva la revisione dei metodi d’insegnamento, il conseguimento dell’eccellenza artistica, pagelle e note disciplinari. Quello che in realtà ora fa parte della mia ordinaria amministrazione è la gestione di situazioni al di fuori della norma, aliene, emotivamente destabilizzanti, che in un paese in guerra, invece, rappresentano tristemente la quotidianità.

L’impermanenza e la transitorietà sono difficili da elaborare come ingredienti inevitabili del nostro vissuto di ogni giorno; sono difficili da digerire in quanto forza radicante nel presente e non come vento di tempesta che cancella il senso della direzione.

Il concetto di resilienza è abusato e tirato in ballo troppo spesso e con troppa leggerezza. Ma momenti come questo, che mettono a nudo tutte le cose che non so, rivelano anche la misteriosa forza che abbiamo dentro e di cui spesso non siamo a conoscenza. Una forza immensa e silenziosa che ci aiuta a tenere insieme i pezzi, a continuare a guardare avanti; che protegge la volontà, come diceva Vittorio Arrigoni, di restare umani.

Make Hope

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At the Institute we are going through a period of transformation. Before we can start building new things, we have to do a lot of cleaning up and should not forget the bigger picture in spite of the frustration coming from tons of banal daily tasks.

Fear is often the first response to change along with great diffidence for those who want or have to promote alternatives.

Yesterday I was talking to my colleague, the real cornerstone of the Institute, about this complicated period: about what we are doing, what is expected of us and about how we need to keep focusing on the vision we are striving to realise. My colleague is a very serious person, a man of few words; discussions with him don’t divert from what is essential neither do they indulge in gossip or self-celebration.

The problem in this country – he told me – is that nobody looks at the future; people are not even sure that a future exists. That’s why we are all here holding on to the present, trying to get the most out of it for ourselves, for our own personal interest, without even thinking of a greater good.

I replied that such an attitude is an enormous obstacle for those who are working in education as they build in the present with an eye to the future.

It is a matter of bad habits – he continued. People are happy with what they have now, the little privileges they have accumulated and close off against anyone who tries to question them.

A bit discouraged, I asked: What are we doing here then?

Before averting his eyes and going back to work, he answered: We are here to make hope.

I just can’t stop thinking about this conversation. These two words – make hope – have completely changed the way I look at things. I have always thought of hope as a dimension of the heart and the soul; as a beautiful feeling, a source of optimism that may however run the risk to turn into a passive waiting for a better future to come. And now I discover that hope is something you can make.

I think this is the beginning of a small revolution. I came to the Institute thinking that I was here to revive the educational offer and now, all of a sudden, I find myself to be here to make hope. The weight of such responsibility terrifies me, but at least now I know that I am in a domain that is familiar: whether I succeed or not is a different story, but at least I can try – at least there is plenty to get my hands dirty.

 

Fare Speranza

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All’Istituto stiamo attraversando un periodo di trasformazione. Prima di poter cominciare a costruire bisogna fare pulizia e fare i conti con la frustrazione che nasce dalla banalità dei compiti quotidiani, senza perdere di vista la prospettiva di lungo periodo. La risposta al cambiamento è spesso la paura e la diffidenza nei confronti di chi, per volere o per forza, propone alternative.

Parlavo ieri col mio collega, la vera colonna portante dell’Istituto, di questa fase complicata, di quello che stiamo facendo, di quello che ci aspetta e del fatto che dobbiamo rimanere concentrati sulla visione che stiamo cercando di realizzare. E’ un uomo serio, il mio collega; una persona di poche parole. Le discussioni con lui si concentrano sull’essenziale, senza pettegolezzi, senza fronzoli e senza alcun margine di autocompiacimento.

Il problema di questo paese – mi ha detto – è che nessuno guarda al futuro, la gente non ha neanche la sicurezza che esista un futuro. Quindi siamo tutti attaccati al presente, a cercare di ricavarne il massimo, per noi stessi, per il nostro interesse personale, senza alzare gli occhi e guardare al bene comune.

Io ho ribattuto che questo rappresenta un ostacolo non da poco per chi cerca di costruire un percorso educativo che lavora sul presente in funzione del futuro.

E’ questione di cattive abitudini – ha continuato. Ci si accontenta di quello che si ha adesso, ci si arrocca su quel poco di privilegi accumulati e ci si chiude nei confronti di chi li mette in questione.

E quindi noi qui che ci stiamo a fare? Gli ho chiesto un po’ scoraggiata.

E lui impassibile, prima di rimettersi a lavorare, mi ha risposto: Siamo qui a fare speranza.

E’ da ieri che non smetto di pensarci. Queste due parole – fare speranza – mi hanno completamente cambiato il modo di guardare alle cose. Ho sempre pensato alla speranza come ad una dimensione dell’anima e del cuore; un sentimento bello, una fonte di ottimismo, che corre il rischio di trasformarsi in un atteggiamento passivo di attesa per il meglio che verrà. Il peso della responsabilità del fare speranza a tratti mi toglie il respiro, ma così, almeno, so di essere nel mio: che ci si riesca o no, è un’altra storia, ma almeno ci si può provare – almeno c’è di che sporcarsi le mani.

A Kabul la resistenza si fa arte

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trainingcraftsmenUn viaggio nella capitale afgana tra teatri occupati, tele in cemento e spazi restaurati. A cui registi, poeti e altri artisti, decisi a combattere contro ingiustizie e pregiudizi, ridanno vita.

Grazie Giuliano Battiston per questo bell’articolo che parla anche del nostro lavoro e dell’Istituto Afgano di Arte e Architettura.

Qui il link all’articolo.

A new adventure

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I have said many times, far too many times, that it was time for me to look for new geographies, to leave Kabul and go somewhere else. Instead here I am, writing again from Kabul where I moved back full time, the reason being a request that was impossible to say no to.

I have been asked to work as Acting Director of the Afghan Institute of Arts and Architecture in Turquoise Mountain.

The Institute is a little corner of paradise in the heart of the old city of Kabul, a modern structure built in mud and wood according to traditional techniques.

The school was founded ten years ago to respond to the risk that traditional crafts would disappear because of war, migrations and carelessness. At the onset of the Taliban regime, in fact, many traditional masters left the country for fear or lack of opportunities thus interrupting the cycle of knowledge transmission and creating a void that was difficult to fill. Those who had stayed back in Afghanistan were struggling to survive – Ustad Hadi, for example, who once was a woodcarver at the king’s court had ended up selling bananas in a wheelbarrow on the street to feed his family.

The initial mandate of the Institute was to gather the threads of a story that risked to be forgotten; today we have one hundred students who are learning the arts of calligraphy and miniature painting, jewellery and gem cutting, woodwork and pottery with the blue glazing coming from a local plant. They are girls and boys, between fifteen and twenty years of age, who are learning a craft and a trade, while contributing to the active conservation of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.

Working in a school like this, preserving the stories from the past while looking at the future, is a serious challenge and a great responsibility. It is also a unique opportunity to think about the role of traditional knowledge – slowly sedimented across generations – in relation to the fast pace of contemporary society; to think about how to keep it relevant and sustainable without anachronisms or the romanticisation of an ideal past.

The synagogue of Kabul

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IMG-1266There are places that seem to be made of the stuff of legend: you know that they exist, that they are there somewhere, but their physical dimension remains abstract and mysterious.

The synagogue of Kabul is one of those places: over these past years it has been a place that almost only existed in an imaginary space– until recently.

I had read a number of articles about “the last remaining Jew of Kabul”; about his bad temper, his passion for whiskey and about the dispute with another Jew – who died in the meanwhile – to claim the right to be called the last Jew. Many colourful stories, but nothing specific about the synagogue itself.

A few days ago, without too much planning and almost by chance, we manage to visit the synagogue with three of my colleagues. As if following a script, Mr Simantov – the last Jew – answers to our desire to go for a visit with the request of a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label. We don’t obviously have any bottle with us on a random Saturday afternoon so we try to negotiate only to hear in return that he does not do things on credit for anyone. We go away a bit disappointed for the missed opportunity. Loneliness, however, must have won Mr Simantov over as he calls us back within a few minutes and says that instead of a bottle, for this one time, he could make do with some cash.

While a lot, or maybe too much, has been written about him, too little has been written about the synagogue.

From the outside the signs of a place of worship are almost non existent; only the eye that already knows where to look will find the stars of David carved out in the windows or decorating the battered turquoise metal gate. At first sight, the door seems to be ajar; it is instead curved up and a bit stuck for being so rarely used. As we look around a bit perplexed, the local cigarette sellers directs us to the back door: you need to go through a bright orange restaurant selling chips and kebabs to reach it. Once you go through the kitchen and cross the building’s threshold the brightness of the neon tubes is replaced by dim light and the stale smell of old fried oil. The turquoise stair railing is an intricate embroidery of iron stars. Hardly anyone climbs up the stairs, the layer of dust is thick and homogeneous.

We spend some time talking to Mr Simantov, who now lives in what used to be the women’s prayer room. It is painted bright green and has a maroon moquette; the gas stove leaks slightly, it makes me cough. Simantov tells us that the synagogue was built in 1966 with the donations from the Jewish community in Herat; he says that in the good old times there used to be hundred and fifty Jewish families living in Kabul. He says it is not because of the Taliban that they left, but because they migrated to Israel and the state of Israel doesn’t give a piss (verbatim) to restore the synagogue that has been damaged by years of conflict. The community itself has never been a target, war has no preference.

We finally get to see the synagogue. Just outside the door there is an old toilet covered in dust and the glass of many windows is broken. We enter and, as we cross the room, our steps leave footprints in the dust. The synagogue doesn’t have a copy of the Torah, but in a cupboard there are old papers and documents eaten up by time and moths. The lamps on the walls are fixed on small plaques that carry the names of the dead.

It is a silent, desolate place. It is abandoned. It is memory’s cemetery, a memento mori, a monument to time.

For those who, like me, work for the preservation of heritage, places like these speak directly to the heart: they are both an accusation and an invite, a request to stop and think. You can’t fight against time, you can’t save every place, every stone, every monument. You need to learn to chose, to let go, to accept that abandon itself has a message to communicate. But then we can, and possibly should, keep telling stories so that these wonderful memory’s cemeteries can continue to survive.

On Advocacy and Policies

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Below is the keynote address I delivered in occasion of the Fall Meeting of the Global Consortium for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (GCPCH)

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It is a great privilege to be here today and have the opportunity to deliver this address on Advocacy and Policies.

Considering the amazing amount of institutional knowledge in the room, the best way I can meaningfully contribute to the conversation is by bringing to the table my experience from “the ground.”

Over the past fifteen years I have been working as an independent researcher supporting artists, cultural practices and productions in countries in conflict. For me, it is hardly possible to think of cultural heritage without thinking of people first.

I would like to begin by showing you a short art film from Afghanistan.

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The film, directed by Farahnaz Yusufi, is titled Ruyeeha-e Parihaa which in Farsi means Angel’s Dream.

There is not much to add to such a testament to the power of ingenuity. Farahnaz Yusufi opens for us a window to the never-ending quest for poetry. In the film, she also makes a complex reference to Sufi mystical culture that I have no time to unpack now, but we can certainly return to later in the discussion. Works like this, which combine a multiplicity of emotional, cultural and symbolic layers, interpellate us – as professionals who work towards the protection, preservation and revival of cultural heritage – with many fundamental questions. These questions, rather than the answers to them, will be the fil rouge that will guide my presentation.

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Baqer Ahmedi, Silent Face, 2014

A few days ago I met up with Baqer Ahmedi, one of the most talented emerging artists in Afghanistan, whom I have had the pleasure to mentor since he started his artistic journey. He updated me about his work and told me that he was not entirely satisfied with the progress he was making: for several months he could not draw as he had ran out of wasli paper and there wasn’t any available to buy in Kabul. Baqer Ahmedi is a contemporary artist, who works on a kind of handmade paper called wasli that is traditionally used for miniature painting – you can see here a couple of images from his work.

Baqer is about to leave Afghanistan as many artists have done before him. He’s going to Pakistan in a couple of weeks to begin his bachelor’s degree in Lahore. There he will be able to buy more paper and resume drawing. His matter of fact tone in telling this story stayed with me: there was no resentment. This is how often things are there in Afghanistan; it is normal not to have paper and not to be able to draw: there’s not much else to add.

It is from this lack of paper that we should probably start when we think of our role in protecting and reviving cultural heritage.

Luckily not the whole world is experiencing the same extreme conditions of Afghanistan, but I believe there’s much to learn from situations of conflict. I have just come back from Kabul, where I have been based for the past five years. In spite of the immense problems that the country is facing to shape itself into a mature and diverse nationstate, it is absolutely remarkable to see the relevance and centrality that culture and heritage play in the political debate.

During the last year, as a programme specialist with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, I worked closely with the Afghan Minister of Information and Culture to design a roadmap for both a National Cultural Policy and for the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The challenges have been and still are enormous. I would like to share some thoughts on my experience and perhaps we can further discuss them in our roundtable later on.

Working at the crossroad between international organisations, funding agencies and public institutions requires a lot of juggling. There are petty power games, there is the pressure to show progress and present deliverables, there is the aspiration to be relevant, to be accurate, to be meaningful. It is a jigsaw made of tons of tiny moving pieces: each of them requires full attention as the puzzle needs them all in order to be complete. Any attempt at cutting corners simply backfires. The greatest dilemma is between the urge to be efficient and the ethical desire to be sustainable.

Here the biggest variables are “the people” and time.

Because of my personal political history, I have always distrusted top-down decisions. This attitude has a profound influence on how I conceive my work. More on this later.

To go back to the issue of “the people” and time, when working in the context of so-called developing countries, our activities are measured by the strict sets of deadlines dictated by donors’ fundings. It is the logic of projects that orientates us along with the requirement to show short-term tangible results matched against large, sustained financial investments. This is all well and good, but it is also extremely easy to lose perspective and forget the big picture.

Most of what I do is to work with people, but working with people requires time and the kind of time that is needed to gain trust and build an equal relationship is out of sync with the temporality of a project-driven modality.

Let’s think of the National Cultural Policy for Afghanistan as an example. The quickest I could envision a roadmap for its development was on a three year scale with at least two rounds of nation-wide consultation with civil society organisations, local elders, religious and community leaders. In a country like Afghanistan, though, even three years into the future are difficult to envision: hardly any donor engages in such a “longterm” commitment, many of the decisions are personality-driven and so directions change along with the high turnover of the people in charge. Moreover, from next April the new electoral season will begin and the uncertainty that this entails may discourage anyone to engage in anything that at this point would appear utterly impossible.

I do not intend to paint a hopeless scenario here, I am rather trying to think out loud about the rationale that is behind what may seem a more pragmatic and certainly faster approach, whereby experts are brought into the picture for short-term consultancies to give answers and supposedly solve problems. Not always, however, is the specific professional competence of these experts paired with a nuanced understanding of the complexity and uniqueness of the context.

This way of working raises a number of questions. Will this ever be impactful? Will the results ever last? Will people ever feel ownership of any of the decisions made in such a detached manner?

The answer to this lack of space and time is often found in advocacy. An unavoidable component of every project proposal, it becomes the way to reach out to the people, to involve them, to make sure that we tick the box of inclusiveness.

In this sense, the idea of advocacy is often mistaken with public campaigning, with large scale mobilisations that bring attention to pressing issues. By doing this, we hope to inculcate new ideas, to communicate to the people the urgency of concentrating our efforts for the preservation of physical and intangible heritage. Besides actions taken within the institutional framework, there are also special events that serve the same purpose.

Here are a couple of examples of individual initiatives that have quite successfully brought to the public attention elements of endangered cultural heritage.

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In 2015, Zhang Xinyu and Liang Hong, two Chinese philanthropes, built in Bamiyan a 3D laser projector to create a 50-meter-tall hologram of the Buddhas that were destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban. This hologram was presented in a public event where 150 people participated.

 Another beautiful example is the “before and after” series of photographs that Joseph Eid took in 2016 in Palmyra.

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Joseph Eid/Getty

 Expressions like these are significant examples of advocacy, but I believe it is important to think beyond them. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against campaigning and public mobilisation. I am however suspicious of an approach to advocacy that is limited to that. In these terms, in fact, advocacy becomes a tactic, almost a quick fix instead of a form of strategy.

I just finished reading a book by Italian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati titled L’ora di Lezione. Per un’erotica dell’insegnamento.

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Massimo Recalcati, L’ora di lezione. Per un’erotica dell’insegnamento. Cover Photo.

There is no English translation of the book yet, the title roughly means The Lesson’s Hour. For an Erotic Approach to Teaching. The book addresses the profound crisis that the Italian school system is undergoing. It looks at how the great social transformations of the last four decades have had an impact on School (with capital S) as an institution as well as on the role that teachers play in the educational enterprise. This is not the right time to go into further detail about the book, but there is one point that Recalcati makes that may be useful for our discussion. He believes that teachers should reclaim their role in presenting to the students the objects of knowledge as erotic objects. In other words, the task of the teacher is to activate the desire to know. In Socratic terms, this is an unearthing process rather than an imposition. The maieutic art of teaching recognises potentials, nurtures desire and facilitates the space of expression.

I wonder if we can use the same model and re-think of advocacy in such terms. This will require, however, a serious shift in attitude.

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at a gathering of geographers and GIS experts in Bangalore in South India on the role that mapping can play in heritage preservation. Most of the participants came from a non proprietary OpenStreetMap (and a free software) background and the discussion that followed ended up focussing on the possibility of communities’ involvement and participation in the identification and geo-localisation of heritage sites. At this point a member of the audience, the only urban planner in the room, stood up and quite forcefully stated that people don’t know what is relevant; it is therefore our duty to teach them the importance of heritage. She left the room soon after, but the echo of her statement informed the rest of the conversation.

The presumption that we, all of us in a position of power and responsibility, know better than “the people” is a scary beast and it encages the nature of heritage within narrow and “managerial” parameters.

Statements like these are problematic at a multiplicity of different levels and they are – whether in a spoken or unspoken fashion – more common than one would be willing to admit. The first order of troubles comes from the fact that we (the experts, the bureaucrats, the academics) set ourselves apart from them, the people. We forget that beyond our expertise it is our cultural roots to make us who we are – be it by embracing or by opposing them. Somewhere, somehow, beyond our professional lives, we belong, we are members of a community and we are shaped and defined by a set of cultural practices, places and meanings that we share with others.

It is remarkable how quick we are in forgetting this when we wear our professional hats.

The second layer of problems with such statements comes from the fact that they ossify the idea of heritage within strict rules and regulations thereby ignoring its granular and embodied nature. In both physical and intangible terms, heritage is malleable and ever-changing, it is that particular tree, that folktale, this street corner that a community aggregates around and identifies with.

When my sister tells the story of where we come from, she loves to say that local dialects change every few kilometres and with every single village. What sets our hometown apart, she would go on, is the fact that we don’t have any distinctive dialect as the city was entirely destroyed by an earthquake in 1915.

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Photo by Lansing Callan for USGS (Us Geological Survey)

It is apocryphal stories like this one that help us shape our narratives as individuals who belong to a place and a community. It is stories like these that perpetuate a notion of living traditions.

I have recently discovered an incredibly inspiring document written under the auspices of UNESCO in 1998 in occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is the Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities, which quite simply responds to the rights we claim with a set of duties and responsibilities that we have in order for our rights to come alive.

The Declaration is a manifesto of the ethics of responsibility and helps us conceiving the shift between moral and legal duties: it is about what we ought to do in order to guarantee the survival of the universal democratic values we cherish and claim as fundamental.

The strive towards equality and meaningful participation in public affairs is at the core of the document.

Relevant to our context, Chapter 11 of the Declaration is dedicated to Education, Art and Culture. Within this section, article 38 reminds us that within communities there is both an individual and a collective responsibility to provide a framework for and to foster arts and culture.

It is on this note that I want to conclude my address today.

As professionals who work towards the preservation of heritage – as well as as individuals who belong to a particular community – our job is also our duty.

When we create the conditions for the protection and the full enjoyment of cultural heritage we are basically performing our civic, obligatory and reciprocal duty as citizens.